“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come from a previous case,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000
doctors,” as he terms himself, is wont to declare in the plea that he is sent out to make all over the country for the establishment of a “national department of health and education to bring the benefactions of modern medical science to every household.” But if one contracts tuberculosis from the germs of another case and he in turn from some one else, how did the first case that ever happened originate? ask the leaders among those who reject the germ theory. Did the causes that produced the first case of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, measles, diphtheria, or other diseases commonly regarded as contagious or infectious, quit the business after producing one case, disappear, and go out of existence, or do they still operate and cause all the cases that occur? That troublesome first case is the missing link in the chain of the theory; but it happened so long ago that it has been lost sight of, and doctors are seldom embarrassed by being asked to account for it.
I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs? Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear and suggestion.
The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and household cleanliness, etc.
A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in the yards and streets, and in consequence
a plague broke out from time to time. Instead of attributing it to the accumulated filth, they accused the Jews of poisoning the wells. So, too, in the case of a girl on whose neck a gland enlarged to the size of an egg; there was at once talk as to whether it was tuberculous in nature. Her mother wondered, if it was tuberculosis, if Minnie got it from the cat! She had always played with the cat a great deal. In this she reflected current medical talk in the papers. She could not understand how it could happen. There was no tuberculosis on either side of the family, and Minnie had always been so strong and healthy. Before she was twenty-five there was nothing left of Minnie’s front teeth but a few black snags—evidence of her having lived largely on sweets, starches, and meat, and that she had not been healthy. But her mother never thought of looking in that direction for the cause.
So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight of.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
Richard Butler Glaenzer
And one answered: Lord,